


What is Broken

by Winterling42



Category: Avatar (2009)
Genre: Canon Rewrite, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-10
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-15 14:16:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12322656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: One of my favorite movies for world-building just falls so FLAT on story. Time to change that with a complete re-write of the movie. Will divert from canon at specified points. Tags will update as chapters are posted.





	1. Prologue

I hadn't seen my brother in four years. Ever since we had that fight right after I got out. He wanted me to do something with my life, said that punching wasn't all I was good for. I wish I could’ve believed him. Back then, I didn't want to let go of that thing: it'd kept me alive. Now I know he was wrong. I'll never be good for anything but punching shit.

He slides into the fire in that cardboard box, and I think they shoulda done better by him, those academic types he was always going on about. They shoulda given him a proper funeral, since I couldn't do it. But he sold out to corporate same as the Army, and I guess I've sold out too, since I'm going in his place. Still, I won't forget the way the fire took him, not for as long as I live. He was my brother, and we’d had each other's backs. Until we didn't.


	2. Norm

Norm had known that Tom had a brother, of course. It wasn't the kind of thing you hid from your training partner, especially in something as intense as the avatar program. Tom had a twin in the army, his brother was a Jarhead who'd always known he wanted to grow up and fight bad guys. 

“It was like living with GI Joe,” Tom had said, while the two of them were dying in the shade of a palm tree. The obstacle course had been a cinch in VR, but running it with their tiny human bodies, even scaled down, was a nightmare in the Florida heat. “I swear, he signed up for Basic the day we turned sixteen. The weird thing was that he meant it, you know? Fighting for the underdog, for freedom, all that bullshit. He believed it.”

“And also kicked your ass at football?” Norm had asked, because that was how stories about Jake usually ended. 

“And also kicked my ass at football.” Tom had laughed his deep, full-hearted laugh, and Norm smiled through his sweat.

Yeah, Norm had known Tom Sully had a brother, but he hadn't expected to see the ship’s manifest to have Sully, Jake on board, much less the unborn Avatar that Tom should have been carrying. It was two nights before take-off, and Norm had been triple checking the paperwork to stop from crying himself to sleep. He didn't actually expect the manifest to have changed; everything from the avatars to the Pandora resupply capsules had been settled for years, not days. And yet, there it was, the name as good as a slap in Norm’s face. It was like going through all the stages of grief, right there in his room. 

“You fucking DIDN'T.” He scrolled through the rest of the papers, refreshed the pages and went through them again. It was a mistake, a misreading. Not even the bottom feeders at corporate would be so cold as this, less than a week after Tom's death. But they were, and the name was still there the third time he refreshed the pages.

“You fish-fucking cowardly sons of BITCHES.” Anger got him through the next ten minutes or so, and he threw his tablet across the room in a futile attempt to change the readings. His house computer mistook the throw for an attempt to pull the documents up onto a wide screen, and all of a sudden the stupid manifest was scrawling all over his wall.

“Fuck you.” Norm spent another half hour or so trying to get a hold of his project manager Earth-side. He planned out everything he was going to say, how they didn’t need some stranger taking over this expensive mission, how Norm could do it on his own, how much of a risk taking a non-scientist was. But it was already the middle of the night, and every number he tried rolled straight to voicemail. In the end, Norm didn’t even leave any messages. He knew, somewhere, that he wasn’t being logical. That his reaction to this wasn’t going to change anyone’s mind. But he wanted it to be logged, somewhere, that he’d  _ had _ an objection. That it wasn’t right to act like Tom was replacable. That they could just put in a substitute and nobody would notice. 

Norm had noticed. The weight of Tom’s death crashed over him again like a wave, everything he would miss. Everything he wouldn’t get to do. Tom would never walk on Pandora, would never open his eyes in a real avatar. Would never laugh again, or smile like he’d found the secret of Creation. Would never smile like that at  _ Norm _ again, wouldn’t kiss him or hold him or just  _ sleep _ . Norm thought that might be the hardest part to get used to--the sleeping alone. He didn’t know how, had lost the instinct somewhere in year two of avatar training. In one way, he was almost looking forward to stasis sleep in a few days. It might be the first time he’d truly been under since Tom’s death.

Norm stared balefully at the ship’s manifest for another hour before he turned it off and laid down. He couldn’t decide, in that hour, who he hated more. Tom, for leaving him, or Jake, who thought he could replace the brother he hadn’t even known.


	3. Grace

Here was the truth about Grace Augustine: she had never loved Earth. She hadn't even really loved plants until she got to Pandora. Grace Augustine had scraped her way into space by the skin of her teeth, by her fingernails, by the scars on her arms. She signed away her life to RDA without a second thought, because she didn't have a life. She had a phD in botany and a fatal love for cigarettes. There were no people, or at least none she trusted, and she couldn't stand the idea of a pet. She worried, irrationally, that she wouldn't be able to take care of it. She certainly didn’t know how to take care of herself.

Dr Grace Augustine ran away from Earth a long time ago. She was on Pandora when the base was just an air-proof shack like the mobile camps. She was here when they discovered the first unobtanium. She loved Pandora, loved the wildness of it. The only living plants she’d ever seen before were in botanical gardens, carefully monitored down to the pH of their water. Pandora was alive, and free, and everything about this place put fire in her bones. She found her faith here in the shrouded forests of the Landing site.

She was here for first contact with the Na’vi. No one had expected to find intelligent life on Pandora--initial scans had shown that there were no buildings on the planet, no development or cultivation. And yet they came out of the forest, twice the height of the miners and more curious than afraid. Grace, even lacking in history as she was, should have told them the first day to be afraid. She should have told them the truth about humans, about what her species was capable of. She admitted to herself, after the school shooting, that it was selfishness that had kept her silent. Selfish, to want to learn from them without warning them of the danger. Selfish, to long for their ability to move among the plants and animals without fear. Selfish, to think that humanity had outgrown its terrible roots. 

Back on Earth, her name collected degrees like moths to a flame. She could name her field, her subject, her publishing contract. Scientific journals were paying her to submit papers on the first extraterrestrial lifeforms known to man. Grace was the head of a rapidly developing department; another person might have let that power go to their head. But Grace still didn’t like people, didn’t like having power over them. She was afraid, irrationally, that she wouldn’t be able to take care of them. She’d left her ego back on Earth. There was only the work, and the research. And then, the avatars. The avatars changed everything.

Originally part of a mining program--as was everything human-related on Pandora--the avatars were designed to negate the need for atmospheric protection. When it turned out to be cheaper to just pay for air tanks and gas masks, the avatar program was folded into Grace’s headache child, the Indigenous Terrain project. Indigenous Terrain had been forced into her department by Terran government pressure, a mixture of anthropology and xenobiology that was made  _ much _ easier by the creation of the avatars. The ‘Dreamwalkers,’ as they were called by the Na’vi, could communicate with the natives on eye level, a subtle change in body language that Grace could peel apart in her next paper.

She didn’t write a paper on how good it felt to inhabit this body--not her body--one that had never cowered from drunken fists or knives in the dark. One that had never been the scared child she hated and pitied in equal measure. Some truths, as always, were hers to guard alone.


	4. Jake

Jake woke up. He wasn’t surprised to have done it, but after six years of sleep, it felt like kind of a big deal. For a while, up there in the directionless cabin with all the other floating bodies, he was just another person. For a while, he was no different than them--just as clumsy navigating zero-g, just as hungover from cryo. Even after they’d strapped down into the landing shuttle, even with the wheelchair folded in the space next to him, he was the same as them. He sat with the security goons, their buzz-cuts and tattoos of regiments familiar wallpaper for friendly insults and bets. The camo they wore was just a little different than regulation stuff, similar enough to be comforting, different enough to remind them that they weren’t in the real world anymore.

Going into atmo, with the screams of the engine wearing out his ears, Jake still felt like one of them. The acceleration pressed into his body the same way, the noise grated around them the same. It wasn’t until they opened the shuttle doors that he was forced to wake up. To remember that he was the special case, that he was the burden. After that, the insults didn’t sound so friendly, the bets on his survival less speculative. He knew the odds weren’t in his favor, but damn. He didn’t need some sharp-chin corporal _telling_ him that.

*** 

The lighter gravity meant that at least it was easier to wheel his way around. Jake tried not to be grateful for that. He didn’t want to be _grateful_ for any of this. Hell’s Gate ought to live up to its name. But the truth was that this place was a helluva step up from his digs back in Cali, even if the people were a little...touchy.

The other avatar driver’s name was Norm Spellman, and he lost absolutely no time telling Jake that he’d been training with Tommy for three years before this mission. There was something forced about Spellman’s smile, about the way he shook Jake’s hand in the hallway outside the mess hall. When he said, “You look just like him.” Jake heard an accusation. _Why couldn’t he be here instead_?

That first day was a jet-lagged whirlwind of condescension and introductions. Or did it count as jet lag if there was cryo involved? There was Spellman, the guy who’d flown in with him and resented Jake for not being his brother. There was Patel, the resident brain dude who got excited about lab-grown muscles. And then there was Augustine. Jake thought, going in, that they’d just hate each other and be done with it. But there was something about her, about the way she talked and the lack of fucks she gave, that reminded him of a better version of himself.

***

Jake wanted to hate Pandora. He didn’t want to see his brother’s face reflected in a blue-skinned mirror, just wrong enough to hurt. He didn’t want to feel safe behind the twenty-foot razor wire fences and the vigilance of a hundred ex-Army goons watching his back. He wanted to be in a hell hole for six years and then he wanted his life back.

The problem was that he hadn’t been in a better mood since he’d been off active duty. Quaritch ran a tight ship. If Jake had been here as a soldier, he would have wanted someone like Quaritch in command. Someone who made no bones about how dangerous the job was, but was still determined to do it well. Hell, there had been plenty of times where Jake would have given a limb or two just for a CO that knew which way was north. Quaritch was going above and beyond on that front.

So the second problem was that he wasn’t here as a soldier, he was here as some half-assed version of his genius brother. And nobody was going to let him forget it. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hm, turns out Jake is still the least interesting character in this movie. Sorry for the short chapter guys!


End file.
